LiveCode 9.5 goes into testing

As announced at our San Jose conference, LiveCode 9.5 Developer Preview 1 is now available for download from your accounts.

We’re pretty excited about this release. It has a raft of great new features, some of which have been eagerly awaited. Originally billed as 9.1, by the time we came to build it we realised it was bigger than that. Here is a brief overview of what is waiting for you.

• Windows 64 bit support – both for deployment and in the IDE
• New Android architectures – Arm v7, arm64, Android X86. Adding x86 is really important especially for simulator performance, you can now run your app in a simulator much faster and more smoothly.
• Container Layer Mode. This brings smooth scrolling to mobile devices. It is an enhancement for the datagrid improving performance across the board.
• PDF widget. Drag an object off the tools palette. Layers like a LiveCode object, so you can put a button on top of it. Has multiple controls, you can scroll vertically or horizontally. Zoom in and out. Set borders, border width, padding. From the API you can get messages when interacting, highlight areas, get metadata from an image, flip zoom, scroll and set passwords. Runs on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Android Barcode Scanner widget – Drag it onto your stack and use it to scan barcodes from Android.
• Log command for debugging. No need for a logging library. A property turns logging on and off, reducing overhead to zero when the property is off.
• Filter where… Filter a search immediately by eg first letter.
• Browser load progress change, check if connection is secure, turn off user interaction.
• Static linked code libraries for iOS device builds – makes it easier to build external libraries on iOS
• Maths operations – you now have real boolean constants and an infinity constant
• Improvements to keyboards on mobile – you can select what type of keyboard you want to display
• Improved sort for international locales
• SQLite has been updated to the latest version
• Added support for URI filenames and JSON storage/retrieval in SQLite DBs
• Several enhancements to the Tree View Widget
• Mac Status Library
• Memory leak fixes – this version should use less memory in many instances
• 80 bug fixes since 9.0.4

As always with a test release, we recommend you back up your stacks before testing. Please report any issues in our Quality Center.

Download 9.5 dp1 from your account, or sign up for an account here.